Kaddish for the City

Categories: uncategorized

Tags: politics, words

Date: 08 June 2009 18:52:10

I had a dream last night. Or rather this morning. It wasn't a very pleasant dream.

I dreamed a song. It rhymed and scanned and everything and had a rather plonky piano accompaniment. It was in the voice of an American black anti-capitalist Christian suicide bomber who was going to detonate a nuclear bomb to destroy a big chunk of New York because the city was so full of sin. He hated abortion and he hated racism and he hated capitalist exploitation and he wanted to show them all how bad they were.

And the song had angry moralising and absurd self-justification and stuff about how he was going to let the pure white light shine through his heart and soul into the city to clean out its dark places; and how he was going to hold his arms spread out as he died in a gesture of love to those he was killing. Or as it occurred to me while dreaming it, some blasphemous parody of the Crucifixion.

The dream was, I think a reaction to news on the radio. I had got the Euro elections and the BNP and the "Christian" party and the Tamil Tigers and the recent murder of a doctor in the USA all mixed up in my sleepy head and my anger against us electing racists and Nazis was coming out in a dream.

It was pretty unpleasant and as I woke up I realised that the piano accompaniment was what was playing on BBC Radio Three at the time - Ravel's [i]Chanson hébraïques[/i] a setting of some Yiddish and Hebrew traditional songs. And I think - I'm not sure because I was still more asleep than awake and I don't exactly understand Yiddish and Hebrew though I recognise some of it - I think the song was Kaddish.

And that was an odd juxtaposition.

If that's what the BNP getting elected does to my brain I think we need to do something about them :(